The 5 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Work Safety Videos

#2. Shake Hands With Danger

So it's the 60s, and you're an aspiring horror director. You've just made your first B-movie, 1962's Carnival Of Souls (now a cult favorite).

Also, you're this guy:

That's Herk Harvey, and he probably thought he was destined for great things after he shot his low-budget horror opus. Fast forward a decade or so, and he's making Shake Hands with Danger, a 25-minute feature intended to scare construction workers into not climbing behind the wheel of their Caterpillar while stoned.

You know you're in for awesome in this one as soon as the ultra-70s country-guitar riff blasts in to announce our narrator, Three-Fingered Joe. He used to laugh at safety, until a journey through the dark corridors of horror drove all mirth from his soul.

While the movie presents a number of what may be commonplace construction site dangers, when they acknowledge at about 8:30 that most people come to work hungover every so often, you begin to see where the real dangers lie.

From the first apparent fatality featuring a man falling off a boom, to our good buddy Glenn having some kind of metal shrapnel hurtle into his chest...

...to a guy getting his arm ripped off thanks to a combination of stupidity and a wandering insect...

...you can see how Harvey merged his terrifying Eli Rothian vision with the timeless message of workplace safety. The result is like a Tales from the Crypt movie sponsored entirely by a backhoe manufacturer.

#1. It Only Takes a Second

This video has one message, and one message only: It doesn't matter where you work, it doesn't matter what you do, in the blink of an eye, one day, your asshole is going to be ripped out through your face and it's probably your own stupid fault.

In what we can only assume was an attempt to market this video to as many employers as possible, It Only Takes A Second is composed of flash cuts of fuck-ups from all walks of life: warehouse, office work and even landscaping.

Curiously, some accidents don't seem so much work related as examples of malice outside the workplace, including at least one incident of what we assume is outright vehicular homicide.

Periodically amidst the bombardment of carnage come these strange, gauzy shots of emergency rooms, people in wheelchairs, and what no safety video is truly complete without, a beautiful young woman slowly turning around like she's in a Whitesnake video only to reveal she has an eye patch. She lost a fucking eye!

We feel the need to point out once again that at no point in this video are any actual, um, safety procedures discussed. Just scene after scene of people tripping over boxes, cars crashing, machinery crushing people like soda cans and then wispy shots of painful and heart-wrenching rehabilitation.

In the final shot where an exasperated mother behind the wheel turns to her bastard rowdy child a moment before her car erupts into a gigantic fireball, the lesson may be either children are assholes and should be abolished, or that you shouldn't travel with a load of TNT under your hood:

We suppose the ideas is that if you haven't turned from the video and flipped off your boss at this point, you get the job. Now be safe!